


The Guttural Muse

by sovery



Category: Angel: the Series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: AND more procrastination, F/M, Rome - Freeform, drabble-type-thing, moping, more titles and fics inspired by poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-23
Updated: 2015-02-23
Packaged: 2018-03-14 17:14:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,018
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3418955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sovery/pseuds/sovery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An unmooring. Angel searches for Buffy in Rome. 900 words.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Guttural Muse

**Author's Note:**

> I had an essay I didn’t want to write. Poem (and title) by the incomparable Seamus Heaney, from Field Work. 
> 
>  
> 
> (Also, I wrote and edited this in the space of an hour and a half. So, uh, let me know if any errors catch and stab you in the eye or anything and I'll fix them)

_Late summer, and at midnight_

_I smelt the heat of the day:_

_At my window over the hotel car park_

_I breathed the muddied night airs off the lake_

_And watched a young crowd leave the discothèque._

 

Sometimes he forgets what it means to be old. It is this: an antithesis. So far removed from the young lovers he watches cavorting outside his hotel he may as well be another forgotten misshapen marble statue in the city – only preserved for the sake of his age.

He had been an artist once.

Italy manages to remain warm even at night – at least here, in the south, in the summer, and Angel dares to think a little of it might slide inside him where once, long ago, another source of heat, of life made him feel whole. It’s a folly. He should not be here; he knows this. But hearing that Buffy might no longer trust him, might have lost all regard for him despite that he had in the past given her reason to do so – well, it nearly destroyed him. He hopes that when he sees her, if she confirms it, she will at least make it quick. Show him some mercy.

Something inside him had come untethered and it was only now that he was able to marvel he had made it so long. He must have done something after she died- after he went away and somehow managed not to kill himself like he had so long ago vowed that he would. He had made himself forget exactly what she meant to him and how pointless it all was without her. He told himself had other responsibilities, other burdens he needed to shoulder. What a joke.

Somehow he had managed to leave Spike behind – and any others. He needs this – to see her alone. To hear her speak. He needs to beg her to believe in him again.

When he told himself he no longer held her up on a pedestal he had been lying.

 

_Their voices rose up thick and comforting_

_As oily bubbles the feeding tench sent up_

_That evening at dusk—the slimy tench_

_Once called the doctor fish because his slime_

_Was said to heal the wounds of fish that touched it._

 

He glides through crowds as effortlessly now as ever. Something in their primitive brains warns them to move and they do so mostly unconsciously. It might not even be the reaction of an animal in the presence of a superior predator- he is still a man for whom women are willing to sway. And the others of his kind are clever enough to move out of his way when he is like this. Hunting.

So many voices. The stimuli is no longer as overwhelming as it once was. He can easily resist the bloodsmell, the sweat and the sex, his eyes no longer fix on this that and anything unique and unusual. Those senses he can focus. It’s the noise, sometimes, that swallows him whole and spits him out, like a great fish. It can be overwhelming when he listens like this, for a name on anyone’s lips.

He has heard she spends some nights here, in this club, and he thinks he can see why she likes it. It’s got enough class to make her feel secure, and enough people to be crowded without being overwhelming. The patrons are well enough behaved, but absorbed in their own spheres, and it is easy to move through the crowd, or, he imagines, to dance alone. He hopes with all of his dirtied heart that she is alone.

If only he can speak to her, he believes, maybe…maybe he can have her again. For a moment. He feels every one of his years and he is weary. She heals him even when she means to hurt him and even if she is angry to see her face again will be worth anything she says. So he searches the crowd anticipating that first painful glance.

Angel has always been something of a masochist.

_A girl in a white dress_

_Was being courted out among the cars:_

_As her voice swarmed and puddled into laughs_

_I felt like some old pike all badged with sores_

_Wanting to swim in touch with soft-mouthed life._

 

Finally, he finds her just as she is leaving. Wearing a little white dress, like the sheets on the bed he first had her in, and then again during a day that never happened. He has to hold back his fangs. He’s dreamed of her in white so many times. They can be the darkest nightmares, or his holiest hopes.

She leans up against a sporty little Fiat and laughs at her companion’s comment. Angel had barely noted the man, and now he takes him in with hate in his eyes. But Buffy is pushing him away gently as he leans in to her. The man obeys, which saves his life.

As she pulls the hair off the back of her neck he is struck by how young she is at twenty three. And he, having passed two-hundred long ago courted her when she was sixteen and still with a head full of childish dreams. Those had died quickly as she had. And yet she has always held so much power in her small hands and saved so many that sometimes he could forget she had spent so few years on the earth. Perhaps she senses him because she turns and he is lost again in her sea-green eyes, adrift and wondering.

As her eyes meet his he mouths her name, almost unconsciously. Buffy. Buffy. As her eyes meet his she is moving toward him, undulating ever closer, unconsciously graceful. He does the wrong thing again, as he has always done, and reaches down to kiss her. For a moment that is all they are and she might have cut him up like a sacrificial lamb, and poured him into a cauldron and witched him young again. He is swimming in her in the eternal city. He is in love.


End file.
